Zack Rosen wrote:
> I apologize in advance for the confrontative nature of this post....
>
> I care deeply about the semantic web research and work happening. I
> truly believe the concepts of the semantic web will be realized one way
> or another (I've bet my career on it). But I am convinced that the
> current tact semantic web research communities (such as SIMILE) have
> taken towards pursuing the vision of the semantic web is unworkable.
>
> I've posted at length about this here:
> http://www.zacker.org/semantic-web-research-isnt-working
>
> I'd love to hear your thoughts....
Zack,
I learned the hard way that debating about technologies, operating
systems, text editors, programming languages, XML schemas and RDF
ontologies doesn't pay off. Why? because it's deeply subjective and,
mostly, irrational.
If what the semantic web researching community creates doesn't work for
you, well, just use something else :-)
For me, personally, the semantic web is just a catchy but a little bit
tacky name.
What *I* like about it is that I finally have a way to encode graphs
that doesn't suck and therefore a general purpose data description
language that is not just a syntax (as XML) but also a model.
And it's easily mixable.
Ergo, I can take your data and mix it with mine and mix it with some
other, stir it with some general purpose tool (browser, visualizer,
clusterer, inferencer, ruler, whatever...) and find out something that
wasn't easy to see there before.
World-Wide Web of Data, Global Data Warehousing... call it as you wish,
but there is nothing really semantic about what we are doing here, it's
just a catchy term (and source of a lot of problems, IMO).
If you care about that problem space, jump on board, it will be fun.
If not, you won't find anything exiting around here, and that's totally
fine too :-)
--
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 email: stefanom at mit . edu
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Received on Sat Jan 14 2006 - 05:56:42 EST